Should Rich Countries Finance Research Conducted in Poorer Countries?

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Yes. Rich countries should finance research conducted in poorer countries when the funding supports locally led science, produces shared knowledge, and strengthens research capacity rather than extracting data, talent, or intellectual credit.

Scientific ability is distributed far more widely than scientific funding. A researcher’s capacity to make an important discovery does not depend on whether their country can afford an advanced laboratory, a large university system, or a competitive national grant agency. Yet access to research funding still depends heavily on national wealth.

A global scientific funding mechanism could reduce this imbalance. In particular, an AI Internet Meritocracy (AIIM) global fund could allow governments, philanthropic institutions, companies, and individual donors in wealthier countries to finance useful research wherever it is conducted. Funding decisions would be based primarily on scientific contribution and verified value—not the applicant’s nationality or the prestige of their institution.

Why Research Funding Should Cross National Borders

Science produces knowledge that can benefit people far beyond the country where the work was conducted.

A mathematical proof can be used everywhere. An open-source scientific library may support researchers on several continents. Research into infectious disease, agriculture, climate adaptation, water purification, or renewable energy can produce regional and global benefits. Even locally focused studies can contribute methods, datasets, and evidence that become useful internationally.

For this reason, research is often partly a global public good. Once scientific knowledge is openly available, one person’s use of it does not normally prevent another person from using it.

National governments understandably prioritize their own citizens. However, relying exclusively on national research budgets creates a structural problem: countries with the greatest unmet research needs may have the least money available to study them.

The disparity remains substantial. UNESCO’s 2026 research and development data release reported that Europe and Northern America invested approximately 2.55% of GDP in research and development in 2023, while Sub-Saharan Africa invested about 0.38%. UNESCO has also reported that four out of five countries spend less than 1% of GDP on R&D.

International financing can help separate a scientist’s opportunity to contribute from the fiscal capacity of their country.

The Case for Rich Countries Financing Research in Poorer Countries

Global Problems Require Distributed Scientific Capacity

Pandemics, climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and environmental pollution cannot be understood adequately from laboratories located in only a few wealthy countries.

Researchers who live near a problem often have essential knowledge of:

• local environmental and social conditions;
• relevant languages and institutions;
• overlooked research questions;
• available infrastructure;
• practical constraints affecting implementation.

WHO states that stronger research ecosystems in low- and middle-income countries can help align research with national needs, increase innovation and improve access to its benefits. Its 2025 global action plan for clinical trials similarly emphasizes equitable research capacity, trained workforces, and evidence suited to local populations.

Financing researchers locally is therefore not merely an act of assistance. It can improve the quality and relevance of science.

Funding Can Have Greater Marginal Value

The same amount of money can have very different effects depending on where and how it is spent.

At a wealthy institution, a modest grant may cover only a small part of a researcher’s salary or laboratory costs. In a lower-income country, the same amount may finance substantial research time, equipment, data collection, software development, or several junior researchers.

This does not mean that research should automatically be funded wherever labour is cheapest. Scientific funding must still account for quality, feasibility, ethics, and expected value. Nevertheless, a global system should recognize that valuable work may be severely underfunded simply because it occurs outside established scientific centres.

Stronger Research Systems Benefit Everyone

International research financing can create durable scientific infrastructure:

• trained researchers and technicians;
• functioning laboratories;
• local datasets and repositories;
• stronger universities;
• improved research administration;
• experienced ethics and review bodies;
• scientific software and technical communities.

WHO’s research-capacity programmes explicitly aim to strengthen individuals, institutions and communities so that they can produce evidence relevant to diseases of poverty.

Such investments can also make the global scientific system more resilient. A world in which reliable research can be conducted in many countries is better prepared for emergencies than one dependent on a small number of institutions.

The Main Risk: Funding Without Scientific Equality

International research funding is not automatically fair.

A project may be described as a partnership while most important decisions remain with the richer-country institution. Foreign researchers may define the question, control the budget, own the data, lead the analysis, and receive the most prestigious authorship positions. Local researchers may be treated primarily as recruiters, translators, field workers, or providers of samples.

This pattern is sometimes described as extractive research or helicopter research. The problem is not that international scientists participate. The problem is that authority, resources, credit, and long-term benefits are distributed unfairly.

A responsible funding model must therefore distinguish between:

Financing research in a poorer country and merely purchasing research inputs from a poorer country.

The first can build scientific independence. The second may preserve dependence.

UK Research and Innovation advises that global research partnerships should address inherent power imbalances and distribute resources, responsibilities, effort, and benefits equitably. Its development-assistance guidance also requires meaningful intellectual leadership from researchers in participating low- and middle-income countries, equitable partnerships, and realistic allocation of budgets and management time.

Principles for Equitable International Research Funding

Local Researchers Must Be Able to Lead

A scientist in a poorer country should not always need an institution in a rich country to serve as the principal applicant.

International funds should permit:

• direct applications from eligible local researchers;
• local control of project budgets;
• leadership by institutions where the work occurs;
• equal participation in research design;
• independent projects without a compulsory foreign partner.

International collaboration can add value, but it should not become a gatekeeping requirement.

Research Priorities Should Not Be Imposed Entirely by Donors

Rich-country governments and foundations may prefer fashionable or politically visible subjects. Local researchers may see different priorities: regional diseases, soil conditions, infrastructure failures, educational methods, neglected languages, or fundamental scientific questions absent from international funding agendas.

Funding should therefore combine global scientific evaluation with local knowledge.

The objective should not be to fund only projects that benefit donor countries directly. It should be to finance valuable research whose benefits may be local, regional, global, or foundational.

Researchers Should Receive Appropriate Credit

Fair financing requires more than transferring money.

Researchers must receive recognition for:

• formulating the research question;
• designing methods;
• collecting and curating data;
• developing software;
• proving results;
• maintaining infrastructure;
• reproducing earlier findings;
• communicating results to affected communities.

Authorship and institutional prestige are imperfect ways of distributing this credit. A more granular system can recognize each contribution separately.

Data and Intellectual Property Rules Must Be Explicit

Internationally funded projects should specify in advance:

• who controls collected data;
• where data will be stored;
• who may authorize secondary use;
• whether outputs will be openly licensed;
• how patents or commercial revenue will be distributed;
• what restrictions are needed for privacy, security, or community rights.

Open science can help reduce knowledge inequality. UNESCO describes open science as a framework for transparency, collaboration and accessibility intended to bridge scientific and technological gaps worldwide. However, openness must not be used as an excuse to disregard consent, Indigenous knowledge rights, personal data, or legitimate local control.

Funding Should Build Capacity, Not Only Purchase Outputs

A project can produce a good paper while leaving the local scientific system no stronger than before.

Funders should evaluate whether financing also supports:

• reusable equipment;
• stable research positions;
• training and mentorship;
• local doctoral programmes;
• technical and administrative skills;
• open repositories;
• long-term maintenance of data and software.

This is particularly important because international grants frequently expire before institutions can retain the people and infrastructure they helped create.

How an AIIM Global Fund Could Finance Research Across Countries

Traditional international grant programmes remain constrained by applications, deadlines, national eligibility rules, institutional prestige, and predictions about what a project might achieve.

An AIIM global fund could use a different architecture.

Governments and other funders could contribute to a shared pool while retaining the option to define lawful and transparent funding mandates. AI-assisted evaluation mechanisms could then identify useful scientific outputs and distribute rewards according to their assessed contribution.

Instead of asking only:

“Which proposal should receive a large grant before the research begins?”

the system could also ask:

“Which verified contribution has created scientific value, and who helped create it?”

This approach connects international funding with results-based scientific financing rather than depending exclusively on promises.

Funding Could Follow Merit Rather Than National Income

An AIIM fund could evaluate research contributions using criteria such as:

• correctness;
• originality;
• reproducibility;
• utility;
• methodological quality;
• importance to later work;
• production of reusable data or software;
• successful replication;
• contribution to research infrastructure.

The researcher’s country could affect practical considerations such as purchasing power, local costs, or capacity-building needs. It should not determine whether the contribution counts as science.

This would support the broader principle of merit-based research funding: scientific value should be evaluated independently of institutional status, nationality, or existing fame.

Contributions Could Be Rewarded Separately

International projects often contain hidden contributors. A senior foreign investigator may receive most of the formal recognition, while local scientists perform essential design, fieldwork, data interpretation, software development, or community engagement.

AIIM could model a scientific project as a dependency graph. Rewards could then be divided among contributors based on the value and necessity of their work rather than assigned only to the final paper’s nominal leaders.

This makes scientific recognition divisible instead of winner-take-all.

Funding Could Be Continuous and Retroactive

A global AIIM fund would not need to choose between traditional grants and purely retroactive rewards.

It could support several stages:

1. Small initial payments for credible early work.
2. Milestone payments for completed datasets, proofs, software, or experiments.
3. Replication rewards after independent verification.
4. Additional retroactive rewards when later work demonstrates greater importance.
5. Long-term maintenance payments for widely used research infrastructure.

This can be particularly valuable in countries where researchers cannot work unpaid for years while waiting for eventual recognition.

Donors Could Finance Global Science Without Micromanaging It

A country might contribute to the global fund because it wants to support climate science, infectious-disease research, mathematics, agricultural research, or open scientific infrastructure. It could express that mandate transparently without selecting individual recipients through political negotiation.

AIIM could aggregate many such funding sources and match them to evaluated contributions.

The result would be neither unrestricted foreign aid nor direct control by donor governments. It would be a rules-based system for financing scientific value.

Would This Drain Money From Scientists in Rich Countries?

International funding does not require abandoning domestic research.

Rich countries can maintain strong national research programmes while allocating part of their budgets to global funds. The two serve different functions:

• National funding supports domestic capacity, education, strategic interests, and national institutions.
• Global funding supports knowledge with cross-border value and researchers whose national systems cannot finance their potential adequately.

International scientific funding may also create direct benefits for donor countries through new discoveries, shared datasets, better disease surveillance, broader collaboration, and more diverse scientific approaches.

The relevant question is therefore not whether every research dollar should leave the donor country. It is whether some funding should be allocated according to global scientific value rather than national location.

Who Should Decide What Counts as Valuable Research?

A global fund must avoid replacing national inequality with centralized algorithmic power.

AIIM evaluation should therefore be:

• transparent;
• contestable;
• auditable;
• pluralistic;
• open to human review;
• resistant to manipulation;
• capable of expressing uncertainty;
• evaluated for regional and disciplinary bias.

Local experts should participate in assessing context-dependent claims. A model trained mainly on publications from wealthy countries might undervalue unfamiliar institutions, regional journals, local languages, unconventional methods, or research addressing neglected problems.

AI should assist the scientific evaluation process, not be treated as an infallible authority.

A Better Principle for Global Research Financing

The case for international financing should not rest on charity alone.

Poorer countries are not merely places where wealthy countries can conduct research less expensively. Their scientists are participants in a shared global system of knowledge production.

A defensible funding principle is:

Research money should be able to cross borders whenever scientific value, unmet need, or global benefit crosses borders—but authority, credit, infrastructure, and benefits must cross borders as well.

An AIIM global fund could implement this principle by pooling international resources, evaluating contributions transparently, and rewarding researchers directly according to demonstrated scientific value.

Conclusion

Rich countries should finance research conducted in poorer countries, but the design of the financing matters as much as its size.

Good international research funding should:

• enable local scientific leadership;
• address locally and globally important questions;
• distribute budgets and credit fairly;
• protect data and community rights;
• build durable research capacity;
• reward verified contributions rather than institutional prestige.

A global AIIM fund could provide the infrastructure for this model. It would allow wealth generated in some parts of the world to finance scientific merit throughout the world—without assuming that scientific talent, important questions, or useful discoveries belong primarily to rich countries.

This would make international research funding not simply a transfer between countries, but an investment in a genuinely global scientific system.